Monday, October 11, 2010

Glenn Beck: a clown by moonlight

"...there's nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight...." Lon Chaney Sr.

(hat to James Kunstler)

David Seaton's News Links

First, once again, it is important to remember that it is central to Glenn Beck's message that nothing in it make much, or sometimes any, sense at all.

This is not some sort of defect due to lack of intelligence or skill on his part.

Quite the contrary, his is a work of art in the media of cynical confusion. There is no other meaning to it than the anger he arouses.

No other fuel for the fires he ignites than the frustrations and confusion of his listeners.

To keep them confused and frustrated is the goal. Glenn Beck is a master of his art form.

What is disturbing is not so much Beck himself or even that an audience exists for Beck. What is disturbing is that there is an enormous amount of money being spent to put him into every home in America. That is terrifying.

The idea is simply to manipulate through emotions. The only real messages are the emotions.

To understand what Beck is doing, to understand him, you must suspend your capacity for rational thought and just let the emotions wash over you and try to take note of them as they assault your endocrine system and all I can say is this: children don't try this at home.

Here is a hostile sample of Beck in full flight just to get your juices flowing:

The USA is moving into what appears to be a long period of low growth and the rapidly increasing deterioration of the American middle class's legendary living standards, not to mention the working poor's. Also reform and regulation are necessary in the energy and financial sectors. America's infrastructure needs restoring and refurbishing. The whole thing is a mess and needs to be firmly taken in hand with the greatest good for the greatest number as the guiding principal.

This means, in the not too long run, more regulations, more control and more taxes, which means in turn that people with a lot of money are going to feel a little less free and a little less wealthy than they do today. They are paying Mr. Beck to help keep Americans from thinking rationally about their problems or thinking rationally at all.

If people could think straight for only a few days, be sure that sensible solutions that would benefit the majority of citizens would follow as night follows day. Those who have discovered and nurtured the talents of Mr. Beck and have provided him with the opportunity to reach millions of viewers are investing their money now to avoid those sensible solutions affecting their future earnings.

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Lately I've discovered that one of Becks favorite targets is none other than Woodrow Wilson, who he accuses of multiple sins, among them for being a fascist avant la lettre.

Watch how he does it:

Here is a little explanation of why he puts this Wilsonophobia all together, written by an egg headed, Ivy League, frau doktor-professor and published in that Marxist-elitist, Islamofascist, cheese-eating, faggot-socialist, competition-for-Rupert-Murdoch rag, the New York Times:

To the campaign to make “progressive” a slur, Wilson is useful. Much as many people admire aspects of his presidency, he has no natural constituency any more, right or left. He was opposed to female suffrage. He supported Jim Crow. He wrote about Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy. He makes a good bad guy. He was also an intellectual, the first U.S. president to hold a Ph.D.(...) This professor-president has convenient similarities to our current chief executive — a scholar of constitutional law, professorial, intellectual, even, in some people’s eyes, effete (as, for instance, T.R. and F.D.R. were not). Jill Lepore Professor of American History at Harvard - NYT

I find it curious that Beck should attack Wilson, when those who supported the foreign policy of George W. Bush, neocons and the like, often portrayed it as Wilsonian. Wilson's interest in imposing American values on errant primitives by force of arms, was often used as the precedent for invading Iraq or fighting the Taliban.

Of course consistency has nothing to do with Beck, still that he should attack the one figure that was used to add a bit of class to Bush's presidency seems a bit weird even by Beckish standards.

My particular beef with Wilson is a little different.

With the best intentions in the world, "making the world safe for democracy", Woodrow Wilson took the USA into WWI thereby setting off a series of catastrophes whose aftereffects we are still living with. I am sure that he would have been horrified to know what his meddling brought about.

It goes like this:

In 1917 Britain and France, Germany, Austria and Turkey had basically bled themselves white and had fought World War One to a draw.

If left to themselves, they couldn't have continued much longer, especially with the Russian Revolution at their doors. Soon they would have had to come to the peace table and split the difference.

Thus there would have been no Versailles treaty and Germany wouldn't have had to pay the crippling reparations that caused the hyperinflation that helped bring Hitler to power, thus avoiding WWII.

The Austrio-Hungarian empire would have had time to collapse more gracefully and Turkey might still have control of the Middle East, thus avoiding many of the problems we have there today such as the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Ask yourself, if Palestine were still a Turkish protectorate and the Holocaust had never taken place and European Jews were living happily in Germany, would Israel have even come into existence?

By entering the war, when it did, the USA was directly responsible for humiliating Germany and thus, in my opinion, is directly responsible for creating Hitler.

So for me Wilson is the father of the most evil century in humanity's history.

And so, logically, to top it off, without Woodrow Wilson there would be no Glenn Beck.

1 comment:

David,I very much agree with you: the whole rationale for entering WWI on the side of the "Allies" was truly nonsense. Before we entered the war, it too, a huge amount of propaganda to turn Americans against Germans (and even their German-American fellow-citizens, in a prelude to how we treated Japanese Americans in WWII). One can only conclude that powerful interests, even more than Wilson's supposed humanitarianism, was behind the move. Before that, America was pretty isolationist. We certainly weren't naturally pro-British, having fought a few wars to gain our independence from them!

Glenn Beck? The question is not whether or not he believes what he says. I doubt he even knows. It's "who benefits," as you say...What a tangled web human history is. Glenn Beck, recovered alcoholic whatever. Hitler, failed artist, teetotaler... wait, I'm seeing a pattern here.Don't vote for those who don't drink.